It's not really a new idea, though. IBM developed NetRexx, a version of Rexx which compiles down to Java, in the mid-90s, for example. Kawa, a version of Scheme for the JVM, dates back to 1996 or so.
I agree. It wasn't new, but back then it was an exception, something really different from the norm. Now it's a more common thing. Now it's taken for granted that different languages can target the same VM and interoparate without going down to C.